Katherine Brodbeck

The limited box book was a kind of culmination, at that time, of my work. In preparing for the mid-career show at that time—it was early in the nineties—I selected from my whole work what I felt most behind, in a kind of narrative that I was forming about it. And that meant dropping away a lot of explorations that weren’t so productive and trying to make a kind of readable line through my work. In the case of selecting the limited edition work, I was thinking of picking works that were from each decade. So I started in 1969 and went on up to 2003, when this came out. The overriding idea of this monograph, which was called Nature, Change, and Indeterminacy, was that I picked works—and this was really the flow of my work, although it’s not the only aspect of it—that were indeterminate, meaning not fixed. However, on the other side, I’m a kind of schizophrenic artist: I do very prescribed works, paintings with pigment, that are very established and not meant to change, so there’s this kind of polarity, as Thomas McEvilley mentioned, of nature and culture. And I suppose in my own work there’s this dichotomy too between stability and the reverse. An [eighteenth-century] Japanese poet, Hakuin, outlined four other ingredients important to me in a work of art: clarity, simplicity, spontaneity, and precision. And I think about those very reduced and clear ingredients in a work of art. An artist of course is known for the quality of his refusals.

Dove Bradshaw’s portable retrospective from 2003, BRADSHAW: Limited Edition Box,1 undoubtedly elicits for the reader associations with Marcel Duchamp–associations readily acknowledged by the artist. Calling to mind Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise (1935-41) and, to a lesser extent, his Large Glass (1915-23), Bradshaw reproduces her oeuvre for the collector, accompanied by Thomas McEvilley’s monograph on her work, The Art of Dove Bradshaw: Nature, Change and Indeterminacy. A self-proclaimed student of Duchamp, John Cage, and Eastern religion, Bradshaw advances and complicates this particular legacy, a legacy with which many artists who began their careers in the 1960s have historically grappled.

There is an overarching tension active in Bradshaw’s work, which is key to understanding the unique contribution of her oeuvre: namely its oscillation between nature and culture. McEvilley eloquently discusses this dichotomy in a conversation with John Cage, published in the monograph. Speaking of a piece in which Bradshaw had subjected a chessboard to a liver of sulfur treatment, which subsequently altered the work’s appearance as it was exposed to air over time, McEvilley states, “This is really what I see as a main theme of Dove’s work…the distinction between nature and culture. The grid of the chessboard signifies culture; the amorphous, changing, process-oriented, unpredictable and hence unknowable ground is nature. And it continues to change.”2

So to represent the sixties, and the very late tail end: I was an art student and I was fooling around with, at first, what were given to me as pets–birds, just as pets. And the first thing I did was to let them fly free in my apartment, and I noticed they were flying up on my books and destroying my cookbooks in the kitchen. And one day I was bicycling home from art school and saw a front wheel of a bicycle and thought, “Oh, it would make an interesting perch.” Of course I was very steeped in Duchamp—I grew up in New York, in Manhattan, and Duchamp’s bicycle wheel was on the ground floor, actually, at that time, as soon as you entered the museum. I was maybe pre-teens when I first saw it and was fascinated by it. And after that, in continuing, as I looked at Duchamp, I became very interested in this work. So the bicycle wheel I strung up horizontally through the axle and used it as a perch for the birds. And believe it or not, luckily, the birds actually flew right to it. And then, as they were hanging out on the wheel—and when they would fly onto it, it would spin and rotate, and I was thinking that it would be amusing to get a zen archer’s target. So I got…I actually couldn’t find a target, had no way to get one, so I thought I would just paint one. I knew what it looked like. And so I painted a black circle, a white one, and then a black outer circle, and painted my own target on canvas and then nailed it to my studio floor. In fact, that’s where I hung the wheel, in my apartment.

BRADSHAW provides a perfect example of the paradox of this distinction: while the subtitle of the monograph references “nature,” the presentation of the individual pieces in an archival box sometimes bows to the effects of nature and other times not. For instance, the copper plate behind Spent Bullet is partially exposed to the air and records an ever-changing imprint of that opening. The same is true for Contingency, since its chemistry is unfixed, as well as for Indeterminacy in regard to the use of unstable mercury. Other works, however, are rarefied by archival printing and mats or, in the case of the mercury, by encasement in a glass vial. Bradshaw thereby plays with the nature/culture distinction in each work.

Plain Air (1969-1991) is perhaps the most straightforward exploration of this paradox. This archival silver gelatin print captures the installation Bradshaw created by unleashing two mated pairs of birds in a room with a bicycle wheel hung from the ceiling and a Zen archer’s target nailed to the floor, recalling Dada and Neo-Dada emblems. In their dynamic movements among these symbols of human achievement, the birds perform, most literally, the oscillation between the poles of nature and culture. A similar flux can be observed in another photograph, Herself in the Element (2002), which presents a nude with her back to the viewer, calling to mind Man Ray’s Le Violin d’Ingres (1924). In place of Man Ray’s F-holes, however, painted on the woman’s back are the names of the chemical elements that compose the human body, in descending order by weight. The O around the woman’s neck denotes oxygen, followed by carbon, hydrogen, and so on, with the words becoming progressively smaller until they appear illegible (at this scale). The image of the woman’s back, which can be seen both to represent the unknowable ground of nature and to reference the Dada master’s photograph, is layered with another ambiguous nature/culture oscillation: the linguistic representation of the biological elements that constitute a human being.

The next decade [the 1970s] was covered with a piece called Spent Bullet. And I was living up in Harlem and there was a police firing range on 100th Street. And I collected bullets from the range, and they were very beautiful. They hit a steel plate and ricochet on another steel plate, and then come into a sand pile to deaden any more movement. And the bullets themselves look like beautiful flowers that open up. Later, I actually made silver and gold earrings from the bullets. And this was a kind of anti-war statement in general. I was thinking that bullets could be turned into jewelry one at a time—of course a Utopian idea. The idea then for a copper sheet was to solder the copper to the copper and to expose the piece as kind of flower-like, something completely transformed from the violence that it implied.

In Spent Bullet (1969/2003), a copper-encased lead bullet that was shot is soldered onto a copper sheet, suggesting metaphors of natural beauty rather than of man-made destruction. It is a rare example of the artist’s political work, the Utopian desire for spent bullets to be retired as works of art or worn as jewelry. Contingency Pour (1984/2002), a study in the reaction of silver to liver of sulfur, is complicated and unpredictable; this work clearly identifies change. However, Contingency Pour is still encased in mat board, which protects the other works in the box from the volatile chemical, again leading us to consider how the box’s individual pieces are contained and displayed. Indeterminacy (1993) consists of seven drops of mercury floating in a glass vial sealed with wax. It is indeterminate in the sense that the mercury is not fixed, although a tiny tag affixed to the bottle, reminiscent of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, warns the viewer not to touch, ingest, or inhale, thus sealing and cordoning off what is naturally hazardous.

Then, early eighties, 1984 was the beginning of my work with silver and liver of sulfur. These were paintings and works on paper that I covered with thin leaf. I would cover these surfaces and then expose them to liver of sulfur. Liver of sulfur I learned about when I was in art school, in fact—it’s a patina for silver, to age it. But I noticed that it not only ages it immediately—sulfurizes it, turns it black—but it continues to change and is never stable. So my early works were just to give it a kind of aged atmosphere, and as a child I was very attracted to antiquity. Much more romantic and much more for the imagination to fill in. And so I think this whole attraction to decay, to leaving room for dreaming, in some way, attracted me. And it’s really intuitive. This is not an intellectual idea, destroying art, it was a kind of visceral response. So I began to do these pieces, and then as I noticed them changing I began to exploit that and try different surfaces. So in this limited box book, it’s the one particularly active piece. It just was a small square of silver [on which] I had used an eyedropper full of liver of sulfur and had injected the surface with it. And it changed quite a lot over the years and continues to. It was encased in a mat to protect the other works from wreckage.

In conversation with McEvilley about Bradshaw’s work, Cage notes how “Marcel Duchamp said, speaking of Utopia, that we won’t be able to reach it till we give up the notion of possession. And this work of Dove’s confronts possession completely.”3

Well, the fire hose is really from the seventies and then 1992. And that consisted of a claimed object, again at the Metropolitan Museum. I had claimed a fire hose: as opposed to a “found object,” I coined the word “claimed” because it was already in an art context. And only this year, so we’re talking about some thirty-seven years after the initial claim, 1976, a label is being posted next to the fire hose, because in that period of time, the Met has acquired the work in their permanent collection. But in the meantime, what I did is that I photographed the fire hose, after I put my card up claiming it; they take it down, I put it up. And then one day I saw it was up, and at the slightest bit of encouragement I decided to take the next step, which was to photograph and make a postcard of my work at the Met. So I made a guerilla card and placed it in the twentieth-century rack amongst my peers—which were sold unblinkingly to me. Over time I stocked and re-stocked them, until some 600 had been sold. And then the Met, a couple of years later, acquired the original photograph to make their own legitimate postcard, which finally came out some fourteen years later in 1992, and that’s the card that’s encased in the box book.

As a multiple, BRADSHAW4 defies the aura of scarcity afforded a unique object, promoting a more democratic conception of possession since it is an edition of 40, albeit in limited supply. This possibility of multiple possession is played out most creatively in a piece included in the box, Performance (1976-1992), in which Bradshaw appropriated a standard fire hose inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as her own work. She then made a postcard out of its image, slipping a stack at a time amongst the postcards of her peers in the twentieth-century racks in the Museum gift shop. Though the staff knew it was not Museum-produced, they became complicit and sold Bradshaw’s postcard for years. The silver gelatin print used in this original postcard was eventually accessioned into the Museum’s collection, followed by the hose itself in 2007. This skewed notion of possession—that Bradshaw could “claim” a fire hose as her own art, have a self-published postcard sold to visitors in the gift shop, and in turn prompt the Museum to acquire the original photograph for its collection in order to produce its own postcard fourteen years later—represents a guerilla alternative to the traditional circuits of ownership and distribution. The Museum has since mounted a wall label next to the fire hose, identifying it as Bradshaw’s work and thus completing the circle.

For the 2000s was a photograph I called Oxygen at the time. It’s an image of a woman whose back is painted with the body elements in descending order by weight. So the O circles her neck and it’s three times the amount of oxygen that we have from carbon, which is next, and then hydrogen, and so on all the way down to trace elements, which you can barely read. It was related to a sculpture, and it was a sculptural idea that I had really as a young child, because I was thinking of our bodies and what elements we were made of.

BRADSHAW: Limited Edition Box ultimately complicates the dichotomies of nature versus culture and unique object versus multiple, all while challenging classic notions of possession and distribution. Like the wild birds flying between the bicycle wheel and the archer’s target, Bradshaw’s work is alive, even when contained in a closed box.

1. Public Collections: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The New York Public Library; The National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; The Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
2. Thomas McEvilley, “Dove Bradshaw: Works 1969-1993. A Conversation between John Cage and Thomas McEvilley” in The Art of Dove Bradshaw: Nature, Change, and Indeterminacy (New Jersey: Mark Batty Publisher, 2003), 83.
3. Ibid.
4. Each copy of BRADSHAW: Limited Edition Box contains in addition a “Special,” a seventh piece–a unique work added as each box is acquired.

Dove Bradshaw Biography

Dove Bradshaw (b. 1949, New York, NY) earned her BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1974). She has been awarded the National Endowment of the Arts Award for Sculpture (1975) and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award for Painting (1985). Bradshaw has received grants from the New York State Council on the Arts through the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for décor and costumes (1987); the Furthermore Foundation for assistance with the publication of the monograph on her work by Thomas McEvilley (2003); and the Antarctic Artists and Writers Program of the National Science Foundation (2006). She has been an artist-in-residence at The Pier Arts Centre, Orkney, Scotland (1995); Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh, Ireland (2000); Niels Borch Jensen, Copenhagen (2001, 2008 and 2011); the Pont-Aven School of Contemporary Art, France (2007); and Palazzo Durini, Bolognano, Italy (2007). Bradshaw has had two mid-career exhibitions at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1998), and at The Sidney Mishkin Gallery, Baruch College, City University of New York (2003). Her work Radio Rocks, commissioned by Lucrezia Durini, became a permanent work in the town of Bolognano, Italy (2006). Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Pierre Menard Gallery, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2008); Thomas Rehbein Galerie, Köln (2011); Larry Becker Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2008, 2012); and Danese/Corey Gallery, New York (2014). Bradshaw has been included in many group exhibitions, most recently at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2009); the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore (2010); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde, Denmark (2011); the Chemical Heritage Foundation, Philadelphia (2011); the Esbjerg Kunstmuseum, Denmark (2012); Colorado College, Colorado Springs (2014); and Sandra Gering Gallery Inc., New York (2014). Her film SPACETIME (2011), scored to John Cage’s Ryoanji, was screened with a live performance by L’Ensemble Mesostics at the Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional de Paris. Bradshaw presented a lecture at the Sorbonne on John Cage entitled Still Conversing with Cage (2012). Bradshaw lives and works in New York City. More information about her work can be found at www.dovebradshaw.com.

Anna Katherine Brodbeck Biography

Anna Katherine Brodbeck (b. 1985, Los Angeles, CA) is Assistant Curator at Carnegie Museum of Art. She holds a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where she wrote her dissertation, entitled “Parallel Situations: Artur Barrio, Brazilian Art and International Exchange in the Post-Studio Era (1969-1974),” on Brazilian art of the late 1960s and early 1970s. She lives and works in New York City.

References

Public Collections: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The New York Public Library; The National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; The Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.